According to international rules, commercial aircrafts shall be provided with a unit generally known as a black box (although they are usually painted with a bright orange colour) having means for recording data regarding the aircraft for investigation purposes.
Black boxes record, on one side, aircraft performance parameters and, on the other side, conversations between the pilot, ground control, copilot and other flight crew, as well as in certain cases images taken by cameras. Black boxes store only the information corresponding to a predetermined last period of the flight, typically 30 minutes.
Black boxes shall be crash survivable and easy to locate containers so they are designed to withstand a crash and they usually have automatic beacons which begin transmitting a signal after a crash to enhance their recoverability. They are usually installed in the tail zone of the aircraft, which provides crash protection for a typical crash. While black boxes can be easily recovered in crash events on land, the same does not apply to crash events in the sea where apart from the problem of locating the crashed aircraft there is the problem of recovering the black box in deep waters.
In order to facilitate the recovery of black boxes it has been proposed, on one side, to eject the black box prior to the aircraft crash to avoid the difficulties found in the aircraft crash scenario for the recovery of the black box and, on the other side, to provide the black box with specific means for enabling its recovery such as, particularly, floating means for crash events on the sea.
However these proposals have not been implemented because they have certain drawbacks. For example, the proposal for the ejection of the black box prior to the crash using ejection mechanisms using explosive means raises security concerns.
The present invention is oriented towards solving said drawbacks.